A Challenge for the U.S.: Sun Rising on the East

In a 2003 article in Newsweek, written on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, Fareed Zakaria — a columnist for the magazine and the editor of its international edition — wrote: “It is now clear that the current era can really have only one name, the unipolar world — an age with only one global power. America’s position today is unprecedented.” He went on to declare that “American dominance is not simply military. The U.S. economy is as large as the next three — Japan, Germany and Britain — put together,” adding that “it is more dynamic economically, more youthful demographically and more flexible culturally than any other part of the world.” What worries people around the world above all else, he wrote, “is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country — the United States.”

In his new book, “The Post-American World,” Mr. Zakaria writes that America remains a politico-military superpower, but “in every other dimension — industrial, financial, educational, social, cultural — the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance.” With the rise of China, India and other emerging markets, with economic growth sweeping much of the planet, and the world becoming increasingly decentralized and interconnected, he contends, “we are moving into a post-American world, one defined and directed from many places and by many people.”

For that matter, Mr. Zakaria argues that we are now in the midst of the third great tectonic power shift to occur over the last 500 years: the first was the rise of the West, which produced “modernity as we know it: science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions”; the second was the rise of the United States in the 20th century; and the third is what he calls “the rise of the rest,” with China and India “becoming bigger players in their neighborhoods and beyond,” Russia becoming more aggressive, and Europe acting with “immense strength and purpose” on matters of trade and economics.

Many of this volume’s more acute arguments echo those that have been made by other analysts and writers, most notably, the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman on globalization, and Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, on America’s growing isolation in an increasingly adversarial world. But Mr. Zakaria uses his wide-ranging fluency in economics, foreign policy and cultural politics to give the lay reader a lucid picture of a globalized world (and America’s role in it) that is changing at light speed, even as he provides a host of historical analogies to examine the possible fallout of these changes.

Photo

Fareed ZakariaCredit
Dan Deitch

The irony of the “rise of the rest,” Mr. Zakaria notes, is that it is largely a result of American ideas and actions: “For 60 years, American politicians and diplomats have traveled around the world pushing countries to open their markets, free up their politics, and embrace trade and technology. We have urged peoples in distant lands to take up the challenge of competing in the global economy, freeing up their currencies, and developing new industries. We counseled them to be unafraid of change and learn the secrets of our success. And it worked: the natives have gotten good at capitalism.”

But at the same time, he goes on, America is “becoming suspicious of the very things we have long celebrated — free markets, trade, immigration and technological change”: witness Democratic candidates’ dissing of Nafta, Republican calls for tighter immigration control, and studies showing that American students are falling behind students from other developed countries in science and math.

While readers might take recent signs like recession at home, a falling dollar abroad and a huge trade deficit as suggesting that the American economy is in trouble, Mr. Zakaria asserts that the United States (unlike Britain, which was undone as a world power because of “irreversible economic deterioration”) can maintain “a vital, vibrant economy, at the forefront of the next revolutions in science, technology, and industry — as long as it can embrace and adjust to the challenges confronting it.”

As Mr. Zakaria sees it, the “economic dysfunctions in America today” are the product not of “deep inefficiencies within the American economy,” but of specific government policies — which could be reformed “quickly and relatively easily” to put the country on a more stable footing. “A set of sensible reforms could be enacted tomorrow,” he says, “to trim wasteful spending and subsidies, increase savings, expand training in science and technology, secure pensions, create a workable immigration process and achieve significant efficiencies in the use of energy” — if only the current political process weren’t crippled by partisanship, special-interest agendas, a sensation-driven media, ideological attack groups and legislative gridlock.

As for the United States’ role in a world that is rapidly shifting from unipolarity into a far messier and more dynamic system, Mr. Zakaria suggests that it should become a kind of “global broker,” forging close relationships with other major countries, while exchanging the peremptory, directive-issuing role of a superpower for “consultation, cooperation, and even compromise” — in short, repudiating the sort of cowboy unilateralism favored by the current Bush administration and embracing a behind-the-scenes power derived from “setting the agenda, defining the issues and mobilizing coalitions.”

Photo

The central strategic challenge for American diplomacy in the years to come, Mr. Zakaria says, concerns China: how to deter its aggression and expansionism, while at the same time accommodating its legitimate growth. He suggests that in a world in which “the United States is seen as an overbearing hegemon,” China might well seek to position itself as “the alternative to a hectoring and arrogant America,” gradually expanding its economic ties and enlarging its sphere of influence.

“How will America,” he asks, “cope with such a scenario — a kind of cold war but this time with a vibrant market society, with the world’s largest population, a nation that is not showcasing a hopeless model of state socialism or squandering its power in pointless military interventions? This is a new challenge for the United States, one it has not tackled before, and for which it is largely unprepared.”

There are some curious gaps and questionable assertions in this book. While President Bush’s controversial No Child Left Behind program has put increased emphasis on test-taking, and college applicants worry about their SAT scores in what Forbes magazine calls “a test-crazed era,” Mr. Zakaria writes: “Other educational systems teach you to take tests; the American system teaches you to think,” adding that “American culture celebrates and reinforces problem solving, questioning authority, and thinking heretically.”

He skims lightly over the critical role that the Iraq war played in shaping America’s current problems on the world stage (he himself supported the effort to oust Saddam Hussein and wrote in March of 2003 that the war “will look better when it is over” and weapons of mass destruction are found). And in sharp contrast to Qaeda experts like the former C.I.A. officer Michael Scheuer (who argue that the Iraq war has served as a recruitment tool for Osama bin Laden) and a new State Department report (which notes the growth of Qaeda affiliates in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, and the growing ability of al Qaeda itself to plot attacks from Pakistan), Mr. Zakaria contends that “over the last six years, support for bin Laden and his goals has fallen steadily throughout the Muslim world.”

Such dubious assertions distract attention from the many more convincing arguments in this book and the volume’s overall take on the United States’ place in a rapidly changing global landscape — a provocative and often shrewd take that opens a big picture window on the closing of the first American century and the advent of a new world in which “the rest rise, and the West wanes.”

THE POST-AMERICAN WORLD

By Fareed Zakaria

292 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Challenge For the U.S.: Sun Rising On the East. Today's Paper|Subscribe